Fake Out Your Adwords Competitors With Location Targeting

Want to mess with your competitors on Google Adwords? All you need to know is their location.

You can find the location of your competitors through various means. If you know the location of the business you’re competing against for a certain keyword, that’s usually enough. You can also check the whois information on their domains. Contacting them via email and chatting it up to get this info works too.

So the basic idea is this. Set up a dummy campaign in adwords and location target it to a 50 mile radius of your competitor. Import the keywords you’re competing with them on. Make some horrendously crappy ads and really low bids, just for that area.

When they search for the keyword you’re competing on, they’ll see their ad higher than yours, possibly prompting them to lower their bids, when in fact, you’re actually showing up in a higher location everywhere else in the country.

Want to prevent this from happening to you? Just use G’s Ad Preview Tool to check how the ads show up in other areas of the country. But it’s pretty unlikely your competition will be thinking of this if they haven’t read this post ;]

Unfortunately, Google often places the State/locality name under ads from campaigns that are geotargeted. So, your competition could easily see that your ads are targeted to “Massachusetts”, etc., and get suspicious.

On a similar note, if you do a longtail search and find a competitor, rather than give away your search query by clicking [i.e. give them kw data in the logs], copypaste the url from the serp into the address bar. It’ll look like a bookmark or type-in n screw up their analytics

I won’t bother giving you a linkback, since you already spammed your link in your comment..twice…

I have a few reasons for not linking you in this post:

1) You weren’t that good at PPC Summit. Out of the 2 sessions I sat through with you, this was, literally, the only good piece of information I picked up. The rest was hours of you telling people to “test everything” which everyone already knows.

2) I already mentioned I’d be posting tips from PPC Summit in a previous post.

3) You can’t copyright ideas, so as much as you think this belongs to you, it doesn’t, and people have been using similar tactics for years. Sorry if this bruises your ego, killer.

It’s good of you to point out that your presentations which people spend over $1000 on for tickets, not to mention what they spend in travel expenses, are comprised of rehashed 6 month old posts from your blog.

BTW, drinking 5 red bulls and then running around the room yelling generic crap about creating ads != public speaking.